Summary

Subtitled A Story of California, The Octopus was the first novel in a projected trilogy that Norris envisioned as an epic study of the cultivation, processing, and distribution of wheat; the wheat would move from the Western fields to Chicago’s marketplace to the starving peoples of Europe.

In the United States, the Populist Party had been formed in 1891 as a collective Western movement by farmers and labor against the rise of political “machines” and trust organizations that threatened the farmers’ livelihood. The party’s demise, which would occur around 1904, was already foreshadowed at the time Norris was completing The Octopus. Several American authors, from Rebecca Harding Davis to Thorstein Veblen, had recognized the dangers inherent in contrived economic shifts and made political trusts the center of their literature. Although Norris had no direct involvement in the Populist movement, his novel stands securely among the major social protest novels of the turn of the twentieth century.

No other novel by Norris so clearly combines his naturalistic and romantic philosophies. The Octopus is a study in natural versus unnatural forces: the wheat versus the railroad and its representatives, nature’s boundaries versus the steel tentacles of the railroad’s artificial boundaries, the unnatural “Other” force of rape (literal and metaphoric) that destroys the natural force of love.

Combining his beliefs about the appropriate scope of an American novel (to depict the realities of a particular region) and the sense of alienation in contemporary society, Norris creates as his protagonist an artist, the poet Presley, who spends a summer in California’s San Joaquin Valley, where he tries to find a purpose for his poetry. The narrative structure of the novel coincides with Presley’s indecisiveness about whether a realistic or romantic vision is the most truthful art form and reflects Norris’s own waffling opinions.

Through Presley’s eyes, however, the reader discovers the intricate processes of growing wheat and the tenacious hold that the railroad conglomerate has on the fate of the farmers. Without a decent price and reasonable travel schedules, the farmers’ crops can be destroyed more readily by the trust’s false manipulations of the market than by the indifference of natural weather conditions. The demise of all the farmers in the novel represents Norris’s belief that no one can withstand the power of such forces.

In the community of the San Joaquin wheat growers, Norris discovered a setting that allowed him to study human interactions in everyday circumstances and in moments of crisis. If this community represents those who love the land and respect its fertile power, it is also symbolic of the fact that no region is safe from the brutal nature of human beings. This dark side of human nature is openly depicted in the railroad characters, from the corporate leaders to their pawn, Shelgrim. As in McTeague, Norris also continues his study of how temptation can lead even the best of people into false actions. Thus Magnus Derrick, the leader of the community, becomes the railroad’s dupe, while his son extends this betrayal to open association with the enemy.

The rape of Angèle becomes a metaphor for the exploitation of the entire community by an intrusive “Other.” The railroad is a known perpetrator, but its ability to pervade the community before many inhabitants had realized...